Bellflower

If I were still 20 I'd be itching for this movie. I'm not still 20. I'm not even still 30 but still, if the preview is any indication this movie's gonna make waves....



Shit, even if it don't make waves: that preview is a work of art.

Luminato: Art as Safe Ground?

The producers of Toronto’s cultural festival Luminato knew who they were picking when they titled their talk “Art as Safe Ground.” Two of the three women on stage have received death threats for their work— Deepa. Mehta for her film, Water, and Anna Porter for her non-fiction books about the Holocaust. The talk’s third speaker, playwright Judith Thompson, did not  mention receiving death threats, but that certainly does not mean her work hasn’t been controversial.

For the rest of this piece click Art as Safe Ground?

Books into Movies: What's the Value in That?

“Never judge a book by its movie”

-J.W. Eagan

Summertime and the multiplex is booming. ‘Tis the season for sequels and movies based on comic books, and sequels of movies based on comic books. Now as much as the “Transformers” (based on a toy line and cartoon series) or “Pirates of the Caribbean” (based on a theme park ride) franchises may require third and fourth films, respectively, for a certain demographic of audience, there are those of us looking for something a little … heartier. Fortunately there are some very big film projects on their way based on actual novels.

But first, it’s worth asking: is that even a good thing?

Isn’t the Book Always Better?

Yes, yes it is, some of us would argue so vehemently that we are happy to skip the film versions of our favourite books entirely. There are those books we hope they’ll never put on screen: J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” for instance. And indeed there are those novels that have been put made into movies much to the dismay of many a loyal reader (the recent film version of the much-beloved cult-classic science fiction comedy “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” comes to mind). As well, fans of Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones” weren’t exactly Facebooking their love of the 2009 movie, nor did they much go to see it (it didn’t break even, apparently).

Even if the book is better ...

To read the rest go here. 

Books (not just) for Men

If you haven’t already heard, there is a baby being raised in Toronto, named Storm, whose parents have decided not to reveal the child’s gender to anyone. Inevitably this has caused quite the stir.

Of course it has; it brings up the old question of whether gender is socially constructed or biological. Do boys really gravitate to blue? Are women only interested in Chick Flicks? Must there be guns and bloodshed to keep men interested?

When the writing is good enough, we hope, the people will read, no matter their gender. Frankenstein was created by a woman, as was Howard Roark, the towering symbol of manhood in Ayn Rand’s always readable The Fountainhead. Conversely, Jeffrey Eugenides, in his Pulitzer Prize winning second novel, Middlesex, wrote seemingly effortlessly about a hermaphrodite.

We like to think we’ve gotten over this, and yet even when classically male types of action stories like the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker turn out to be directed by a woman (Kathryn Bigelow), this still comes as a surprise to many. To be sure, the marketing people behind these movies generally believe—and probably for good reason—that boys usually like stories about war and girls are inclined toward tales that end in a wedding.

In lieu of Father’s Day then, and bowing to the realities of a gender divide that, whatever your opinion, looks to be sticking around, what follows are a selection of male authors so careful in the words they set down, so effective with brevity and intensity, so adept in not overtly showing emotion, but yet drawing it so powerfully from their readers, that they are surely selections that will not only be great picks for dad, but also for any reader of great fiction.

Continue here to read that list. 

On Scared Texts: The New Yorker at Luminato

 HEAVY HITTERS

Three fiction writers—a Jew, a Catholic and another Catholic—walk into the CBC building in Toronto for the city’s annual multidisciplinary cultural fest known as Luminato. It was no joke. Though there were a good many chuckles had by writers and audience members alike throughout the event entitled “Sacred Texts” (one of four events at Luminato produced by the New Yorker), it was a far more thoughtful, not to say religious, but honest, soulful, affair—the kind that illuminates for us why we read in the first place.

The authors had been chosen for their use of religious writings within their fiction and as such, had been asked to read from a sacred text precious to them. They shared the stage—bare other than the chocolate leather chairs they sat on and a small Persian rug laid out before them—with Deborah Treisman, the Fiction Editor at the New Yorker, ie. the woman who selects the short stories that enter that illustrious magazine. One of the three authors you have probably heard of; the other two, while not as well known (yet?) as their Irish stage mate, were both anointed under the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list. She was selected the first time the magazine made the list in 1999 (as were relative unknowns David Foster Wallace and Jhumpa Lahiri), he in the list that came out this year (Jonathan Safran Foer was on that one).

For more go here.

A Literary Map of the Middle East - Indigo Fiction Blog Piece #2

This is the introduction to my latest "Literary Review" on Indigo's Fiction blog:

 Even now, or perhaps especially now—with the hope that has emerged with the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and the potential for revolution in Syria (and less so in Libya)—the ever-pressing concern remains over the stability of the Middle East. And that’s not to mention the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Dictatorships, military rule, a peace process that may never come to pass: what good, one wonders, can come of all this strife? It brings to mind that wonderful quote from the film “The Third Man” about Italy having thirty years of warfare, terror and murder under the Borgias but producing Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance; while in Switzerland they had peace, democracy and five hundred years of brotherly love: “And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

The hope, then, is that all that strife will—at a minimum—contribute to the overall cultural value of the region, and it doesn’t take much digging to discover all that it has to offer in literary treasures ... 

Read the rest here. 

the DRIVE movie: 2011

Ryan Gosling ("Half-Nelson," "Blue Valentine"), who can act the pants offa your average Hollywood act-or, stars in a dark noir thriller of a movie called "Drive," based on a novel by James Sallis that is supposedly un-put-downable fun page-turny goodness. 


So you've got the story. 
So you've got the actor.


But about the action? 
Who's the director? 


Some Danish bloke named Nicolas Winding Refn. He also just so happened to pick up the Best Director award at Cannes this year for this flick. 


I think it's gonna sizzle, and be original and, like I said, bad ass. Here's proof: